Staff Profile

Dr Alan Jamieson

Background

I am a Senior lecturer and teach marine ecology, specialising in deep and extreme environments. My main personal research interests are in deep-sea technology for the study of deep-water fish, bioluminescence and anything from extreme depths (or anywhere that simply isn’t normal). My current research team comprises Dr. Thom Linley (PDRA), Dr. Will Reid (PDRA), and Johanna Weston (PhD).

My research interests are primarily the biological exploration of the deep sea and associated technology with an emerging interest in simulating extreme marine environments in laboratory conditions. My main focus is on exploring the very deepest parts of the ocean, the Hadal Zone (6000-11,000 m). The hadal zone comprises deep trenches formed by tectonic subduction and centred mostly around the Pacific Rim. I have published about 80 peer reviewed papers and participated in 50 deep sea expeditions and have recently become a member of the Royal Geographical Society.

I have led the design on many Hadal-landers that my ever-evolving team and I have now deployed in or around the hadal trenches over 220 times over 18 cruises to the Pacific Ocean: Japan, Izu-Bonin, Mariana, New Hebrides, Kermadec, Tonga, South Shetland and Peru-Chile, as well other interesting deep-water sites such as the South Fiji Basin, Wallaby-Zenith Transform Fault and the Afanasi Niktin Seamount. Other non hadal expeditions include Antarctica, West African Margin, NW Atlantic submarine Canyons, and the East and West Mediterranean (the KM3NeT project). This work has recently diversified into exploring other extreme environments through the MASTS Deep Sea Forum, and leading a biodiscovery expedition to the South Shetland Trench in Antarctica in 2015 (‘PharmaDEEP’ Project).

The highlights of this research so far have been unequivocally proving that decapods do exist in the trenches, filming of the deepest fish seen alive in 2008 (Click here) and again in 2014 (Click here), filming the deepest fish in the southern hemisphere (Click here), having a hadal amphipod named after me (Click here) and finding the ‘supergiant’ amphipod in trenches and the southern hemisphere for the first time (Click here). I was involved in the first biological exploration of the New Hebrides Trench (Click Here) and Peru-Chile Trench (Click here), proving that fish are biochemically constrained from reaching full ocean depth (Click here), reporting manmade pollutants at full ocean depth (Click here) and more recently ingested microplastics (Click here), and finding and naming the deepest fish in the world (Click here). Check out some of the coverage from the Mariana Trench expedition on SOI's RV Falkor: BBC News, National Geographic , New Scientist , Science, Discovery and on Youtube.

I recently published a monograph on the hadal zone for Cambridge University Press that can be found here. This book was endorsed by film director and explorer James Cameron who called the book "The most comprehensive book yet written on the mysteries of the ocean's deepest places, written by one of its best explorers". It was also nominated for the Royal Society of Biology Book of the Year award in 2015 (didn’t win though). You can read the review in Nature News here.

Our paper describing anthropogenic pollutants in the deepest places (Jamieson et al. 2017, Nature Ecol. Evol.) has an altmetric score of 2179 and is currently ranked 1st out 104 tracked articles of a similar age in that journal, and 34th out of 321,712 articles of a similar age in all journals. Our other recent paper on hadal fish, Linley et al., (2017), was the most downloaded paper in Deep-Sea Research Part 1 in 2017. See Google Scholar profile here.

Interesting public outreach endeavours range from appearing on Blue Peter (Click here), to advising the Filmic Art 3D Deep Ocean Experience Blu-Ray DVD, to featuring in NHK’s 2017 David Attenborough narrated documentary Deep Ocean: Descent into the Mariana Trench, as well as my lander featuring in the Deep Sea episode of Blue Planet 2 as well as some images being printed in the accompanying book. I featured in a BBC radio documentary called Life in the Trenches, and recently took part in a BBC World Service panel show, Science in Action with Roland Pease. Me and my research were recently the topic of a question on the popular quiz show QI, where comedian Romesh Ranganathan gave his own hypothesis to explain snailfish zonation. I was also an invited speaker at the 2017 New Scientist Live event in London.

Meltwater, an advanced global digital media and intelligence monitoring company recently calculated my 2017 Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) at $15million, with a combined audience of 1.7 Billion people. The ‘social echo’ of just one of our stories was over 900,000 posts on twitter and Facebook.

He is currently the Chief Scientist on the Five Deep Expedition (www.fivedeeps.com), a round the world expedition on the DSSV Pressure Drop. The objectives are to use the new DSV Limiting Factor 2-person submersible to dive the deepest place in each ocean. During the project I became the first British person to dive to hadal depths (7180 m in the Java Trench) and have since completed a 10,715m to Sirena Deep in the Mariana Trench and 7177 m in the Puerto Rico Trench. The Sirena Deep dives makes me the eight deepest diving human in history.

For more on the research and the scientific literature, go the ‘Publications Tab’, to read more from a popular science perspective go to the ‘Research Tab’.